CAN the Sandy Hook massacre be used to score political points? Yes. Ken Dixon, reported in theConnecticut Post of Bridgeport on Neil Heslin’s appearance before a state legislative panel in Hartford. Mr Heslin’s son, 6-year-old Jesse Leis, was murdered by Adam Lanza. Dixon wrote:

“The Second Amendment!” was shouted a couple of times by as many as a dozen gun enthusiasts in the meeting room as Neil Heslin, holding a photo of his slain 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, asked why Bushmaster assault-style weapons are allowed to be sold in the state.

“There are a lot of things that should be changed to prevent what happened,” said Heslin, who said he grew up using guns and was undisturbed by the interruption of his testimony.

“That wasn’t just a killing, it was a massacre,” said Heslin, who recalled dropping off his son at Sandy Hook Elementary school shortly before Lanza opened fire. “I just hope some good can come out of this.”

“MASSACRE GUNS ON SALE IN UK,” yells the Sun. “Lethal assault rifles like the one uses in America’s Sandy Hook massacre are being LEGALLY sold in Britain.”

No shocks. Back in 2009, Anorak spotted the “invisibility cloaked” tank at the Defence & Security Equipment International show, the largest world’s arms fair. In 2011, 1,200 defence manufacturers converge in London to show everything from the latest unmanned aircraft to camouflage body paint. The show is back in London this September.

“There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza,” – Charlotte Allen, NRO

THE Sandy Hook Massacre: only two British newspapers continue to lead with the horror in Connecticut:

The Mirror has “THE LOST CLASS”, the faces of murdered children. They weren’t “LOST”. They were murdered. If the Mirror is going to go for the emotive it could at least not couch the horror in the language of mystery.

The Sun, however, takes the biscuit with a picture of busty former soap opera actress Helen Flanagan posing in her lingerie whilst pointing a fake gun at her head. The Sun is aghast and agog:

“As 26 lie dead after US school horror, Corrie’s Helen Flanagan poses with a gun to her head.”

FOLLOWING the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary school the National Rifle Association America has released the following statement:

“The National Rifle Association of America is made up of 4 million moms and dads, sons and daughters – and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown.

..look at the photo of Adam Lanza. Or better still watch the videos and manifestos made by the Columbine killers or the Virginia Tech shooter and other recent school shooters. Do you really see Southern-style gun culture in these videos and words and images, or do you see a different, more modern culture at work? I see youngsters raised to consider themselves little gods, who see their self-esteem as king and who believe their angst must always be taken seriously. I see youth brought up in a world where we are increasingly encouraged to cultivate a persona, preferably a dangerous, edgy one, through media like YouTube and Twitter. I see young people so imbued with the narcissistic creed of the politics of identity, where how you feel and what you want must take precedence over any social or communal considerations, that they have been absolutely wrenched from both their own communities and from even basic moral codes.

We? Who are ‘We’? Humanity? British? Columnists? The Brookers? The voyeurs? Who is meant to benefit for this internationalised trauma?

I was a country boy. When I was growing up, there was a shotgun in the house. Dad shot clay pigeons for sport. I fired it once myself, with his assistance. Had to wear ear protectors. When you pull the trigger, a shotgun punches you hard in the shoulder. It almost knocked me over.

Guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.

This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.

As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be…

It is a natural tendency on the part of most human beings, when confronted with great evil, to want to do something about it. We want to stop the horror of death and violence and disease. It speaks to what is good within us that we desire this—it speaks to a recognition on our part, innate and abiding, that there is something terribly broken in this world—a great mistake which has been made along the way, a gear missed in the works, a gaping hole where something should be. The feeling is all the stronger when we face the destruction of innocent life—the life of a child. The Mishnah tells us that the act of murder destroys a whole world—the world as it would’ve been with that person in it. When the worlds wiped out are so young, the shock of it all echoes and rebounds throughout the lives of others for generations. And the only part that can be played by those left behind is one of charity.

This is a frustrating limitation, and so those who are more naturally given to see problems of law or culture as the reason for evil look at the horror of Newtown as something that can be prevented, if only we do this or that thing, pass this or that law. Something must be done, they say. But their somethings all have this in common: none of their proposals, on guns or mental health or any other factor, would have prevented this awful crime. In the real world, there is no law that can make the murderously insane sane, or remove all weapons from their grasp. The tweaks that have been attempted in the past in our nation and others have proven insufficient time and again. And no step which disarms the law-abiding will help…

The guns used by the madman were purchased legally by his mother and kept safely in her home – as with most guns used in criminal acts, they were stolen. His own attempt to purchase a weapon ran into the legally required waiting period. There are just only so many steps you can take to prevent evil of this nature and still have a free society. After all, what really happens when you pass gun bans is that effectively, they work as permanent authorizations for police to stop and frisk urban minorities. Consider the case of Chicago, where Rahm Emanuel is talking about more restrictions in the wake of Newtown. What does he have in mind? There were 192 shootings in Chicago last month. On Friday alone there were 10 people shot in his city. Whatever Emanuel’s new law is, it would not prevent these crimes. In Mexico, there is one legal gun store to serve the entire nation. It is, according to the Washington Post, “not very busy.” In America, there are roughly 300 million privately owned firearms – and while some may dream of putting these firearms in a pile and melting them down, most Americans understand that the result of giving the government a monopoly on force would be awful for the very innocents such policies are intended to protect…

In the end, the options for what the law can do or society can do are largely limited. They will not prevent this sort of evil from happening again. This is infuriating, of course. All we can do, on an individual level, is prepare ourselves to do whatever it takes if we are put in the position of those who stand between the marauder and the innocent…

DOES the media corrupt the story? The look-at-me ABC TV news woman speaks to Pastor Jim Solomon who knows that a six-year-old girl survived Adam Lanza’s murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School by playing dead. She stayed quiet. She may have been too petrified to move or speak. Play dead. It’s human instinct.

In March 2012, 16 Afghan civilians were killed by U.S. Army Soldier Robert Bales, allegedly.

Can you name them? Did President Obama weep on the TV? Was it front-page news in the UK?

The Sun leads with news of the massacre in Sandy Hook. But how can it justify such intense coverage? The US is accessible. We share the same language. America invented rolling news and burnished news anchors and reporters into personalities, dispatched to deliver not the facts but news the audience will enjoy. Last week the news was obsessed with the death of Jacintha Saldanha, the “Royal nurse” who had committed suicide. This week we’re invited to gawp at terrible events in small town in Connecticut.

After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)…

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children…congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.

It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector…

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.

SANDY Hook Elementary School Newtown, Conn.? How do British newspapers report on the actions of Adam Lanza that led to 27 dead and hundreds of lives scarred? In Britain we stop and stare. This is a foreign news event. But it isn’t entirely. America is the another Britain. We see ourselves. The landscape is familiar. Language matters.

“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

Plenty of people — especially among America’s political and journalistic classes — feel differently. They’d be much more comfortable seeing ordinary Americans disarmed. And whenever there is a mass shooting, or other gun incident that snags the headlines, they do their best to exploit the tragedy and push for laws that would, well, take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, but one of the most significant is this one: It doesn’t work.

“Ultimately, you can take away every gun in America and somebody will use a bomb. When somebody has an intent to do incredible damage, they’re going to find a way to do it… People will want to pass new laws, but unless you change people’s hearts, they’re our transition to the pastor side. This is a heart issue, it’s not something, laws don’t change this kind of thing.”

Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother dead and targeted her kindergarten class at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., sources said. Sources also told The Post that Lanza’s mother was a teacher at the school and he “had a dispute with her.”

IS this the face of Ryan Lanza, the man police suspect murderd 27 people in Newton, Connecticut? His mother is a teacher at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. He was 24. He was born in Newton. He lived in New Jersey. Well, so say Reuters and CNN. On Facebook, Ryan Lanza says it’s not him. How can it be? The killer is dead.